Video & Your Google Marketing Stack: A Match Made in Heaven

Google has a hand in just about everything these days. Case in point, their electronic throat tattoo microphone patent (with optional lie detector). It’s not enough for Google to possess the largest index of websites in the world. Or for their 100,000 servers to be capable of randomly communicating with one another at a rate of 10 Gb/s (100x faster than the network originally created in 2005). No…they had to take it a step further and stake claim in both sides of digital marketing, too.

At its simplest, digital marketing can be broken down into two parts, online advertising and technology. Online advertising is (and has been) dominated by Google and Facebook. In fact, Google makes about 90 percent of its total income from advertising. Meanwhile, technology is largely owned by big wigs like IBM, Oracle, and Adobe. But Google refuses to settle. Over the years, they developed a sophisticated suite of tech tools to help marketers conquer the digital realm. We call it “The Google Marketing Stack.”

The Google What?

The Google marketing stack is a mostly free collection of powerful (and integratable) marketing technologies that help marketers manage advanced digital marketing operations. Originally, the stack consisted of:

• Google Analytics: for tracking website activity (demographics, time spend, number of visits, conversions, sources of traffic, behavior, etc).
• Google Adwords: for purchasing ads from Google/partners (usually search engine ads and display ads).
• Google Search Console: for understanding specific site properties, like the efficiency of underlying code, inbound links, error pages, site speed, indexing status, and security issues.
• Google Tag Manager: a tool that enables non-tech marketers to add tags to a website.

Since then, the demand for a more holistic view of online marketing efforts has grown. By holistic, we mean the ability to see how marketing efforts impact ever level of business (and beyond). In response to this growing demand, Google’s marketing stack evolved into the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a collection of cross-channel data and analytics products that rival Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Marketing success hinges on ones ability to integrate analytics with marketing technologies, advertising tools, and business goals. The 360 suite helps make this alignment more feasible for marketers with 6 products (three of which are still in beta testing). 

Analytics 360

• Provides insight into website and app usage
• Evaluates content performance
• Integrates with Google advertising products

Tag Manager 360

• Enables you to add/update tags for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, etc.
• Checks for tag errors
• Supports all Google tags and many third-party provider tags

Optimize 360 (beta)

• Allows you to A/B test variations of your website without writing any code.
• Tailor website features and observe their immediate impact on customer behavior
• Use insights to create a more personalized customer experience

Attribution 360 (formerly Adometry)

• Unifies and analyzes all available data
• Illustrates a marketers complete efforts
• Measures the effect of each ad on conversion
• Offers insights and advice based on business needs

Audience Center 360 (beta)

• Collects and organizes all data sources
• Analyzes where audiences overlap and which ad frequencies work best
• Builds lookalike audiences based on best performing customers
• Integrates with Google ad products to translate audience intel into better ads 

Data Studio 360 (beta)

• Creates easy access to all data
• Provides built-in collaboration tools
• Allows you to drag/drop data to create visual and informative reports, charts, graphs, etc.

The 360 Suite & Video. A Match Made In Heaven…

Video marketers, close your eyes for a moment. Imagine you’re at the beach, the soft breeze tussling your hair. The ocean waves rhythmically crashing against the shore. The sun, warming your face…no, wait — that’s not the sun. That’s the promising glow of the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Kind of heavenly, right?

The ultimate goal of any marketing strategy is to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. 

The only way to successfully achieve this trifecta is with marketing technology. But it’s not just about collecting data, or using technology to organize it. It’s about all technologies being integrated to share and make major sense of data in real time.

This is what GA 360 is promising; an enhanced view of all your video marketing efforts, and clear direction on how to leverage what you see. Here’s the other key advantage — most video marketers already have the capability to see how audiences interact with their video campaigns (at least to some degree). The Google Analytics 360 Suite intends to shed light on customer behavior on- and off-line.

This is what holistic marketing is all about!

From pinpointing which site/ad version is most successful per a segmented audience, and knowing exactly which channels and devices your audiences are using, to accessing marketing data across company departments, and tracking all marketing spend (on and off line) to determine performance by channel — video marketers are equipped to create experiences around their video content at a granular level. You guys…we’re talking about having the ability to reach and connect with individuals, and tailor each experience to each customer. We’re talking about data-drive attribution!

Can the Google Analytics 360 Suite really create this degree of seamlessness for video marketers? It’s too soon to tell. But all marketing teams should be prepared — marketing technology is about to become mission critical. Save space for it in your 2017 budget.